


Everything Starts After Everything Ends

by misreall



Series: Loki And Nora's Infinity Stone Playlist [13]
Category: Loki: Agent of Asgard, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor - All Media Types, Tom Hiddleston - Fandom
Genre: F/M, Hair Kink, Hair-pulling, Kissing, Sex, Spanking, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-13 10:30:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13568724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misreall/pseuds/misreall
Summary: Takes place immediately after the end of The Road to Hel is Paved with Misunderstandings.  It is for Caffiend, for all of the reasons.





	1. Rattle My Bones

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Caffiend](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caffiend/gifts).



> Takes place immediately after the end of The Road to Hel is Paved with Misunderstandings. It is for Caffiend, for all of the reasons.

 

He carried her.

Not speaking.

His sly smile, the trickster smile he had worn when he had picked her up in the kitchen was gone.  He face was almost blank, save for a tightness around his eyes, the corners of his mouth.  Like he was holding back from saying something.

He hadn’t kissed her, either.

That was ok.  Now that the initial, ravenous hunger and surge of energy she had felt once she had managed to get a good bite of Idunn’s apple had waned - not so easy for someone who hadn’t eaten sold food in weeks - Nora felt strange.  Not her emotions, which were still taking some time to sort themselves, but physically it was like stepping through cobwebs, which crawled along her skin, arms and legs first, and then the rest, leaving a feeling like a bit like sunburn when your flesh is tight and feels unnatural.

Then she realised her skin  _ was _ tight now.  Not just wrinkled and frail, like an old silk dress that was going to shatter if it was tugged at.  She wasn’t cold for the first time in so long.  Except for her toes, which she could wiggle easily and without pain.

Everything felt less... acute than before.  Less urgent.  

These were no longer her last days.

She wiggled her toes, hard.  He raised an eyebrow as she did, but still didn’t speak.  

She wasn’t exhausted, she didn’t shake.

Her hands didn’t hurt.  God, she had forgotten what it was like to be able to clutch something, to let something go. To do any of it without having to hide that she wanted to cry from the pain, because his frustration at being unable to help her was harder to endure than the arthritis.  

She took a fistful of his hair and leaned her head onto his shoulder.

Other than an odd, slight tightening of his arms, he gave no response.

She could remember things she hadn’t remembered in decades.  Her childhood phone number.  The name of the boy who had kissed her when they were twelve who she had then shoved off of the monkey bars.  The name of the teacher who had taken her to the school office for it.  How to make marinara sauce like Claire had taught her, but really wasn’t very good.  The lyrics to Mad Tom of Bedlam, and Rattle My Bones, and Unknown Legend, and Funnel of Love.  How to pick the lock on the backdoor of the bungalow when she locked herself out.  The log in number for her computer at CDV.  

Outside of the bedroom door, she put a hand on Loki’s arm, “Not there.”

“Why?”  The depth of his voice rumbled through her bones.  He looked down at her now, a fine line between his eyes.  She saw every shade of green in those eyes.  They had always seemed like a near-to-perfect emerald to her before, even when close, but now she could see faint bits of jade, and celedon, and a tiny speck of blue just above the iris of his right eye.  

From the moment she had looked up from eating her way through the kitchen and seen him, her stunning husband, she had thought about how much she wanted him.  For his thin mouth to trace her edges.  For his elegant, beautifully veined hands to smooth and scratch her fresh skin.  For his cock to find its way home deep in her.

She thought it.  And she felt it, sort of.  It had been a long time, though, and they needed to be together.

But not in their bedroom.

Even through the door she could smell the memory of her age.  It stank of how closely death had been hovering over her, waiting for Loki to leave them alone for long enough for it to swoop down and take her.  

She knew he had smelled it as well.  Every day he had gagged on her mortality while he sat at her side, reading to her, trying to feed her, watching her as she slept or lay in that state that had neither been sleeping or waking.  She had seen it and had wanted to beg him to go away for a while.  To give himself a break from watching her die.  But each time she brought it up he would just shake his head and change the subject.

“I-, I just, I was in that stupid bed for so long.  Can we,” she wiggled out of his arms, “go into the library or the living room?”  She ran her bare foot along the smooth wood of the floor and sighed.  Everything felt so good.

He made a gesture for her to lead on, now frowning slightly.

Fingers trailing over the wainscotting, Nora went to the living room.  Quickly.  She could move quickly.

The Persian rugs under foot that she wanted to roll around on, but settled for tracing with her toes.  The air smelling faintly of irises.  She turned lightly, her eyes closed, feeling the cool air on her legs and face.  

Loki didn’t follow her into the room.  It had been… god it had been nearly a decade since she had been healthy enough to have anything close to sex.  She knew that it wasn’t uncommon for people who are with someone who can’t have intercourse to lose their own sex drive.

With Loki  _ that _ was pretty much impossible  

He had been flirtatious with her until the end.  Not the seductive flirting that was his stock in trade, but light and funny and sweet.

She had told him when she had started feel her years, sometime in her seventies, that if he needed, even just wanted, to find someone else as an outlet she wouldn’t care.  That she would be happy to know that he wasn’t going wanting.  

Maybe… maybe he had taken her up on it, after all? It had been almost twenty years, and he was the patron god of a few sexual acts so if nothing else he was probably required to engage in them from time to time. 

Nora closed her eyes again, the image of her husband in the arms of his twin High Priests on Asgard. Or with one of the many queens and kings he had seduced across the Nine Realms swam through her mind.  She wasn’t angry if that was true, or upset, but there was still a little pain.

A lot of pain.  

She refused to hold it against him.

When she opened her eyes Loki’s frown was gone.  He looked at her so softly, the tears she had refused to let him shed in the kitchen now back.  “I loved you grey.  With your skin marked with age, your eyes even wiser than when first we met, always seeing through me when I could not see through myself.  Even if I could not show you that love in my own,  _ prefered  _ way, I felt it more and more.  Endlessly more,” he thudded a fist to his chest.  “Believe that from a liar.  But I have longed for… the possibility of you.  Knowing that with every day that passed there would be a day less of you in universe was agonizing.  That there was so much you would never do or see, that there were so many, many things I would never be able to show you.”

Nora took a step towards him, then another.  But he stayed still, a small, open mouthed smile, his eyes black with want.  “And now that I have finally outlasted my one rival for you-”

“Rival?”  She snorted, and his eyes turned predatory.  His hand fell unconsciously to where his cock insistently ruined the line of his perfectly tailored trousers, stroking slowly.  Fondly.  She stared and felt needles and pins through her skin, as blood rushed and started boil for the first time since… since… who knew?

Now he moved closer, head cocked.  “Death.  The one suitor of yours that I could never frighten away, has now retired from the field.  For a few thousand years at least.  The intractable boor.”

He moved closer, taking her space, her air, his head bowed over hers, his words falling onto her, “Now we can have everything.  And I am going to fuck you with no mercy, for the fright you gave me when I couldn’t find you.”  He stooped and threw her over his shoulder, knowing that she hated being carried that way.  Too many bad memories.  Too little equilibrium. 

“I was in the kitchen!” she yelped, grabbing the back of his jacket.

“You should have left a note,” he said, very, very calmly, and then gave her a hard, quick swat to her behind.  “And you are going to have my handprints on your toothsome ass as promised for that nonsense about suggesting I take another lover.”

“Oh, you remember that?” she asked with a little trepidation.

The one time she had suggested he might find someone else as she was less and less able to have sex with him hadn’t gone well.  They had been on the ship, and before he had stomped out of her library, he had actually growled at her.  Not a human or Asgardian or even Jotunn growl, but that of a furious animal.  “Were you more vigorous,  _ my  _ princess, I would take you over my knee and spank that grotesquery out of your daft head!”

And then he was gone, not just out of the library but the entire ship for at least a week.  When he returned he had pretended the conversation had never happened and didn’t tell her where he had been, and that had been the end of that idea.

“I remember everything,” he answered, still far too calm.

“Who says I’m going to let you?”

He tossed her roughly onto the huge couch, her dress disappearing as she fell.  He followed her down, pinning her to velvet, still dressed in his immaculate suit.  “You will say it, of course,” he whispered along her neck, his teeth and his tongue doing impossible things to her, his wool covered knee firmly rocking against her.  “Are you not curious about if I _could_ break you now?  Do you not want to know the limits of this freshly nubile body?  I’ve been such a good boy for so very long.  Let me destroy you and then put you back together again.”  He grabbed a heavy handful of her long, long hair and moaned, pulling as he had never been able to do before with her short style.  “Please, say yes,” his voice going from calm to mocking.

Nora could tell that whatever he had been through before his return had been terrible.  Even after all of this time he hid behind the facade of the imperious bully when something hurt him too deeply.

All the while she had been trying to kiss him, snaking her head to try and catch his lips, but he evaded her easily.  

“Kiss me…” she kissed his jaw, his chin, his neck.

“No, if I do I will lose what little sanity I still have caught under my fingernails.  First, say yes.”  He looked her in the eye, trickster smile quirking his lips, “Treasure.”

“Yes, dammit, but then you had better ki-” her angry words ended in a shriek as she found herself flipped up and over Loki’s lap, her hair still caught in his fingers, his other hand tracing lightly across her ass.  He hummed with pleasure, “So lovely.  Now how many would be apropos?  What was that quaint human custom of birthday spankings?  One for each year?”

“I’m ninety-one you Satanic ass!  And no, not the number of years we were married either,” she added, knowing how he thought.

“No, that  _ would _ be excessive. I suppose,” the fingers of his free hand dug into her hair again.  He found the scar above her ear from the Battle of New York and sighed with pleasure.  “I had worried that might have healed,” he murmured.  

Once Loki had loathed that scar, shuddering if he should accidentally touch it, but at some point his view of it had changed, and he had told her that he thought that it had been an unconscious promissory note on his part.  His mark to guide them together.  She had told him pretty plainly what she thought of that at the time, but she had to admit that since that time she loved it when he touched her there.  Something about it soothed both of them.

“Very well,” he said, his voice again crisp and amused, “it is twelve years since you made that unsound proposal to me, so a dozen it will be.”

“Just get on with i-.”

Loki had wonderful hands.  Nora had appreciated those hands for six decades.  They had brought her exquisite, sometimes dangerous pleasure.  They had offered her comfort and flowers and cookies and wine.  They had held onto her hands, her fingers disappearing within their grasp.

But she had never before entirely appreciated how big they were.  How much of her ass one of them could turn into a stinging mass of pain.  

“Jesus Fucking Santa Maria Christ!” she screamed and then bit his calf, getting a mouthful of wool and a scornful laugh for her trouble.

“If you do that again I will have to add to your total, princess,” he said with calm amusement.  “You should count, it will give you something constructive to do with your mouth.”

She was a senior citizen!  The oldest person she knew, except for Cap!  She deserved some dignity.  “Like hel-,” she started to rage and struggled to get up. His hand came down with alacrity. 

The fall of his palm on her already painful skin, and the ripple of the impact through her flesh, trembling up her spine and down her thighs, made it almost impossible for her to hold back an undignified shriek.  

Over the years she had grown so used to pain.  The cramping feeling when her hands were especially bad in the cold and damp.  The way her skin was irritated by everything as it grew more delicate.  Her bones.  Her blood.  Time poisoning her.

But that had been  _ her _ pain, caused to herself by not dying.  No one and nothing had dared to cause her any hurt for ages.  Loki had made enough examples that even his more implacable enemies had stepped lightly around Nora.  

All of the stoicism she had built up as she felt her body giving up on her was useless when trying to control herself against an assault from the outside.

From Loki.

He now rained several more blows in quick succession, the speed causing nearly as much pain as the heaviness of them.  The shock of the barrage caused her to howl.  She couldn’t stop it from happening no matter how hard she fought to lock her throat.

Concussion after concussion on her tender, new flesh, leaving bruises that she could feel waiting to emerge, the pain growing and growing, and starting to feel ominous.  It worked down through layers of her, through fat and muscle, grazing her bones, leaving her trembling and gasping with agony as each blow made her more sensitive to the next, made the her hips grind on his thigh, left her raw straight to her heart.

He stopped, his hand softly draped over the wound he had given her.

“Eight,” his tone was slightly bored, which made her a little crazy.  

Maybe she  _ had _ died.  This could be hell.  

Her fingers scrabbled on the rug, trying to pull herself off of him.  Her body wanted mercy and she felt humiliated and ridiculous.  “No, that can’t be!  It has t-,” she felt panicky.  

Again, he cut her off, as his hand slid down the curve of her ass and dipped between her legs, two of his fingers stabbing with no warning into her cunt.  He worked her, fucking her, the sound of her wet even louder than the sound of her breathing, as her body tried to register both pain and ecstacy at once.

Her unbelievably wet and over-stimulated cunt immediately clenched around his fingers and held them for dear life.  Nora’s whole body trembled around his touch, and she contracted, her legs squeezing his wrist, her arms wrapping around his calf, as she found herself nuzzling the toe of his Chelsea boot, almost drooling on the leather.  

“Mmmmm… your sweet body has so many more secrets than I ever dared delve for,” he crooned, his voice showing the first tenderness since this whole, miserable, intense ordeal had started.  His voice trailed off into whispered words in a language she didn’t recognise - one that sounded harsh and certain, but secretive.

Nora was shaking so hard she almost couldn’t tell that Loki was shaking, too, as he seemed to have to forced himself to stop and remove his fingers, making her sob.  

She had forgotten what he could be like.

The next three blows came, steady, echoing off of the ceiling, and made her whole body convulse.  It no longer felt like he was hitting skin.  It was like she had to be gaping open and he was attacking her nerves directly.  Sobs turned into the silent crying that came with too much of anything, but Nora still tried to steel herself.  

Nothing happened.

It was like he was barely even breathing.

“Just do it…” she pleaded.

Nothing.

Nothing.

It hurt so much worse to just lay there, vulnerable and waiting.  

Waiting.

Waiting.

The hand still in her hair squeezed, seeming to pull every, single strand, her head burning with pain, at the same moment that his other hand fell on her in the most almighty, skin blackening, blistering, lacerating strike that made her scream. 

She screamed out the years of her body failing around her while her husband stayed young and beautiful.

The years of not feeling that she was a real wife.

The years of everyone at home dying one by one by one until she felt like the last of her kind.

The years of wondering if that would be her last year.  

Then last month.

Then last week.

Then last day.

What she was certain would be the last hour.  When Loki was gone and she thought she might die alone.

Within the scream Loki turned her, so quickly, carefully, so her behind was between his thighs with no pressure on it, and held her close as she cried, whispering love under her weeping, his hand back against her cunt, pressing as she found herself pushing, grinding against his palm.  His eyes burned into hers, all distance and irony wiped away.

Her thighs spasmed, opening and closing frantically, as pressure built within her and her flailing hand found his and pushed harder and harder, until her clit throbbed in time with her wounded ass and he kissed her.  

The gentlest brush of lip on lip.

A sweetheart kissing his sleeping love.

An orgasm exploded through her, the power of it wound her around his body like molten metal being quenched and turning to tempered steel.  Surge after surge of hard, unforgiving pleasure, as her body aligned itself to its new reality. 

When she came back to herself, Nora found herself curled up on Loki’s chest where he had lain back upon the couch, holding her still.  

“I love you so very much, Nora,” he said, wrapping his arms around her, squeezing her tighter than he had ever done before, his face buried in her hair.  

Clearly, her hair being long again was going to be a thing with him for a while to come, so she thought maybe she’d leave it that way for a while.  If it made him happy.

“I love you,” she turned her face to his, sinking into a series of soft kisses.

Again his hand fisted in her hair, yanking her head back, a cruel smile and cool eyes meeting hers.

“Now, then, where were we?”  He asked.

Clearly he planned on making up for all of their lost time.

  
  
  



	2. Shake My Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki's view

Nora being harmed was maddening above all things to Loki.

To be the one to harm Nora was abhorrent.

Thus it was to his great, good fortune that he was still accustomed to both madness and horror even after years of his mind being guarded by his wife.  Even and especially as directed inwards and was therefore was able to dismiss the distraction caused by his unruly feelings to  _ concentrate _ ...

It would not do to flinch or falter.  

It would not do to lift her from where she was gracefully draped across his lap, naked and helpless, blossoming with new promise and seething with rage, turn her in his arms and crush her to him and weep over her luscious skin like a rescued child.  

It would not do.

His hands were shaking.  

It would not do.

Even though his clothing stank of the creatures between the worlds and of his own sweat and dread and so much worse, there was a lingering note of sweetness and failure from where the lost apple has nestled in his pocket.  He was repulsive to himself, but Loki wanted nothing to detract or distract from the moment so he remained in his soiled clothing.  

It had been many decades since he had enacted an erotic chastisement.  Those upon whom he had worn out his hand at those times were of a different order than his treasure.  They yearned for his mastery and ached for the yoke.  Often he had been the one to lead them to that revelation, but other times they had eagerly placed themselves under his palm, practically glowing with needy anticipation.

Nora was… not like that.

When she bit into his leg it was hard for Loki not to laugh with joy, to maintain his facade of distance.  Or to flinch away for that matter.  The woman had always had a will to bite him, loving the feel of his flesh in her teeth and now had the jaw strength to back it up.  He could not wait to later see her mark finally on him, deep and red.

Instead of looking now as he wanted, he concentrated on her ass.  On the firm bounce of it under his palm, the ripple of the force coursing through her luscious padding, down through her core and her thighs, the hard sting in his hand that was nothing compared to the pain she felt as he added rapid blow after blow to her reddened flesh.  He could smell her clean, sweet, healthful sweat, and the growth of her arousal as her already confused body responded to the strangeness of the situation, the nearness of its husband, the unstoppable needs of its renewal, no matter how cruelly he treated her.

He stopped.  

So she could gather herself.

So he could gather himself.

So she could truly feel everything now that her precious body was well enough to experience physical life again.

So he could feel her.  

How  _ long _ it had been since he had felt her.  

How lonely.  

Nora burned with new life.  She burned and her cunt dripped venomously hot wetness into the cup of his hand and it was all he could do to not lap it up like a starving cat, to not rub it onto his mouth, into his skin.  What pretty scars it would leave upon his lips.  Instead he fucked her with his hand, whilst she writhed on his lap, trying to get closer to him, worshipping his boots, even though they had carried him to another world and he had killed and killed whilst wearing them.   

They were both going a little mad, it seemed.

Loki said something to her, something sincere, but ultimately just some seductive nonsense to divert Nora’s attention from his own rapidly deteriorating reserve.  This was not about him, not for him, and his penis was just going to have to  _ wait.   _

Longer still.

What was another few minutes to the years that had gone before?  Loki knew that Nora, that most mortals, assumed that somehow life moved faster for the long-lived, that what for them was an era was for creatures such as himself, a blink.  But even as his treasure’s life had passed him in an unstoppable blur, he had felt every moment of intimate denial on his hungry skin.  Towards the end he had even denied himself the pleasure of sleeping with her, holding her as she slept, for fear that he would accidently cause her harm.  His nightmares were always a danger to her, but now so much as rolling over could have powdered her brittle bones, ruptured something irreplaceable. 

She said she understood.  That she appreciated his tender concern, even as she would turn away from him, pretended to be interested in a book, a puzzle, the pattern of the rug.

He knew that however much he might have reassured her to the contrary, that Nora thought he stayed away from her because he was horrified, maybe even disgusted, by her age.

Loki’s aching balls of the last decade and more proved that was a lie.  Not that he hadn’t missed her as she was now, however it meant very little to him compared the rest of her.  But it mattered very much to Nora.  He remembered the last time they had been together carnally, she had wept after he had loved her.  Her body had hurt from the stress even as he took as much care as possible, was as gentle as he had ever been in his reckless life. And the sight of her withering, thin skin next to his own, all but ageless body, hurt her even more.

Jotunn magic - which tasted foul but had intense power when it came to the physical - was required to quell his insubordinate cock as he closed his eyes to better enjoy the opulence of his fingers deep within her.  Once such a touch had been a daily and more that that occurrence, then a rarity, then a luxury, and then had stopped happening altogether. 

If Nora could tell how close he was to snapping, of dragging her to the floor and using her, burying his cock and his loneliness in her she would not hesitate to take advantage of it.  To make this about what he needed and to hide her own wounds as she always did.  To make everything about him.

Not that he had ever complained.  Not that he had never not let her.  He wanted it as well.

He slid his fingers free, enjoying the silk of her and the unselfconscious writhing of Nora’s glorious self.  He wanted to laugh.  How strange to want that now.  He used to laugh all of the time, _ they _ laughed.

He gave her three sharp, strong blows, more defined than the last flurry.  

They both froze, Nora trying to breathe, trying to control her pain, Loki with his hand raised above her, staring at her rump, now bright red, the definition of the shape of his hand lost, save for here and there where the shape of one of his fingers could be made out.  He wanted to lick her there, enjoying the coppery taste of the blood being close to the surface.  He wanted to bite and make her howl.

He wanted so very, very much.

“Just do it…” she pleaded.

He waited.  

And waited.

He knew it was much worse for her than his doing it, the waiting.  Knowing how she hated to beg, Nora had be truly suffering to even offer that much.

He wasn’t doing himself any favors, either.

His hand convulsed around her silken hair, squeezing, at the same moment he broke, his hand falling with as much strength as he thought she could tolerate on her already painful skin.

Nora screamed in agony, her strong, clear lungs pushing out the sound of her death.  Then agony turned to the rage, the grief, the mourning, the suffering, the ugliness, that she had pushed down to spare him when all he had ever wanted was to give her a place to unburden herself.  To let her bleed upon him as he had bled on her time and again.

He flipped her in his arms, cradling her between his thighs so no place that hurt would be hurt more, and took possession of her already pulsing cunt, finally allowing himself the kiss that he had longed for since he had left for the other world that morning.

He kissed her as softly as he could bear, her breath stealing through him and warming the great cold of the between that had frozen even him.  He kissed her like he was one of those princes in those ludicrous Midgardian children’s stories who kissed their princesses to wake them.

It was as if he had been toying with and teasing her for the past decade since last he had been able to bed her.  Nora’s release wrapped her about him like an unbreakable strand of silk and he wrapped himself about her like an everlasting chain holding her to the earth.

He told her he loved her, and she loved him too.  If that was even the right word for what was between them.  Perhaps it was why neither of them said it so often, because they were both aware that the word, while beautiful, while true, was imprecise to what they were.

Her long, long hair, the hair that he had longed for, he wrapped about his fist once, twice, and then again for surety, tight enough to bite into his palm, firm enough to direct her as he desired. Nora’s mouth gasping open beneath his, the pull on her scalp keeping her from being able to shut it or speak.  

Finally, he rid himself of his befouled clothing, sending it he knew not where, only far from them both.  Lifting her to stretch out beneath him on the sofa, she writhed and winced as her wounded behind rubbed on the velvet.  “Fuck,” she hissed at him, glaring, “you better plan on fixing me, you a-” which turned into garbled music as he thrust into her hard and began to fuck her with cruel, steady impact, the sound of his hips hitting her loud in their empty home.

The sound of her gasping, as she strained against him, with a little scream on the end of each smooth plunge as he bottomed out in her.  

“Come again, treasure.  Come again and again.  Don’t stop until I tell you,” he said, pulling what exhausted magic he had left from his journey and pushing so it dragged where they were joined, like a tongue lapping at her even as Loki buried himself in her.  

The relief!  Not because he could not still hurt her.  He could.  He would always be ridiculously stronger and too fast and too heavy.  But because the line was so much farther now.  So much farther.

It gave him so much more to work with and with what he could give her.

But right now he needed to fuck himself all of the way into her so they would never be separated.

What was left of her voice was screamed out in no time.  

The velvet beneath them was shredded and soaked.  

Nora was reduced to limply laying in his arms, trying to reach of up to touch his face but her arm falling, sliding down his shoulder, landing on her breast where it slithering off, so sensitive that even that small brush to her nipple sent her flying again.

Loki hitched a knee high to push her right thigh off of the couch and used the leverage to pull her on and off of his cock, no longer certain that he was not hurting one or both of them.  He needed more.

More. 

There had to be more.

“I’m here,” she whispered, her broken voice making him shiver, and now he was simply wrenching his hips, “you got me.  For years and years, for thousands of them.  Really.  It’s real.”

When she said it, even with her weakened voice, the sanity of it was like a knife.  He had found a way to make her understand her new reality even as at heart he did not believe it himself.  

Loki knew that even as he held her, drenched in her, the last monster from the closet was his certainty that he would wake up alone and that this was all a magnificent delusion.  One that he would gladly live in forever.  They could lock him away somewhere quiet and let him make love to his wife in his mind until he died and could do it in heaven.

Because Nora would get him in.  She could talk anyone into anything if she had enough time.

“Let go, my handsome prince.  I’m safe.  You’re safe,” her breath and the edge of her smile brushing the shell of his ear, “and I’m starving.  I need you to get me five pork chop sandwiches and a whole case of Girl Scout cookies.”

With a burst of startled laughter, Loki’s climax wrenched free and overwhelmed both of them, the massive sofa finally, after decades of good and loyal service, groaning under the force of their two strong bodies, and giving way with a mighty crack.

“Thank god,” Nora said, crawling out from under her husband and then curling back up on top of him while his chest heaved, “we would never have gotten it clean this time.”

Loki curled himself about her, weakly stroking her hair, “Lunch very soon, I promise.  I just want to close my eyes for a moment or two.”

He was asleep, truly asleep for the first time in a dozen years, before he finished the final word.

Nora looked at her treasure, then kissed his cheek, before snuggling into him, her eyes closing for the first time in a dozen years without worrying that they may not open again, whispering, “Liar….”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I was taking a month off to work on my novel, but I need a break.


End file.
